From Mystery to Manners : A Study of Five Detective Novels by Dorothy L. Sayers

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From Mystery to Manners

A Study of Five Detective Novels by Dorothy L. Sayers

Randi Sørsdal

Master thesis

Department of English

University of Bergen

Spring 2006

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Perhaps because clue making so often involves the routine and minutia of ordinary life no other form of popular writing tells us as much about the age in which it was written than does the detective story.

P.D.James

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“mystery,” and he describes the fundamental principle of the mystery story as “the investigation and discovery of hidden secrets” (42). Stephen Knight, in his recent book Crime Fiction 1800-2000 on the development of the genre, discusses the terminology and settles on “crime fiction” as a general descriptive term. He argues that although some call the genre “detective fiction” and others “mystery fiction,” this does not apply generally, because “as a reader soon discovers there are plenty of novels […] without a detective and nearly as many without even a mystery” (xii). In his view most of the various terms used for the genre refer to sub-genres of crime fiction.

There seems to be a common opinion that the founder of the modern crime story is Edgar Allan Poe. Crime stories had, however, been published before Poe, and Knight argues that The Newgate Calendar may be regarded as the original pre-detective stories.

It appeared in the 18^th century and was a collection of immensely popular crime stories which claimed to be fact, telling the stories of criminals in Newgate Prison. But it was Poe who, according to Knight, “constructed a form strong enough to predict the possibilities of the genre that was not yet in being” (26).

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Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) presents the amateur detective Auguste Dupin who by deductive reasoning solves the mystery of the killings which in fact are done by an orangutan. In addition “The Purloined Letter” (1845) and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842) feature Dupin, and these three stories are regarded as models for later amateur detective fiction, also called stories of ratiocination,

specifically in creating the analytical detective.

Detective fiction is mainly Anglo-American. According to Glenn W. Most (346) one may distinguish between two basic traditions, the English and the American. The English tradition starts with Poe, although he is an American, and is brought to its classic form by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was directly inspired by Poe. Dennis Porter is of the opinion that “apart from a type of heroic detective, what Doyle acquired above all from Poe was an art of narrative that promotes the reader’s pleasure through the calculation of effects of suspense on the way to a surprise denouement” (28). Although there were several interesting detectives in the 19^th century, there is only one Great Detective. Conan Doyle was his creator. Sherlock Holmes is “a detective who is highly intelligent, essentially moral, somewhat elitist, all-knowing, disciplinary in knowledge and skills, energetic, eccentric, yet also in touch with the ordinary people who populate the stories” (Knight 55). With Sherlock Holmes the detective was established as central to crime fiction.

Knight argues that after the detective had established himself, the next stage in crime fiction was the insistence on death as the major crime. This had earlier not been the case, and in much of Doyle’s work there are other crimes represented, like theft or fraud. In Knight’s opinion the causes for this new development may be multiple, but he says that it is in the period between the rise of Sherlock Holmes and the beginning of the 1920s “that death becomes the central theme in crime fiction” (68).

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The Golden Age of classic detective fiction is usually taken to mean the time between the two world wars. Typical of these stories, which are often called puzzles or clue-puzzles, is that they take place in closed societies or settings like the village, a city apartment, a locked room. Cawelti states that at the time of Poe the setting performed many functions. Some of these were no longer relevant at the time of the Golden Age, but “the isolated setting has remained popular with the classical detective writers for another reason. It establishes a framework for the treatment of manners and local color in a fashion often reminiscent of the great Victorian novelists.” An example of this is in his opinion Dorothy Sayers’ Nine Tailors from 1934. Here the setting is a rural society,

“out of Thomas Hardy,” as a frame for the art of bell ringing (97).

The characters in the classical detective story belong mostly to the upper and upper-middle classes. The stories contain lots of clues and red herrings, as they are supposed to be an intellectual game for the reader. The element of ratiocination is important: “Is the problem of sufficient complexity to seriously challenge the

ratiocinative powers of the reader?” (107). In contrast to the later so-called hard-boiled detective fiction by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the clue-puzzles are often bloodless, the murder takes place off-stage. The plot is the important thing, characters are often shallow, they are there only for the sake of the plot and not for any depth of characterization. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay “Aristotle on Detective

Fiction,” argues that Aristotle’s writings on tragedy in Poetics may be a guide to modern detective fiction and “quotes” him as saying: “The first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of the detective story, is the plot, and the characters come second”

(180).

After the First World War the novel replaced to a large extent the short story in detective fiction. In Cawelti’s opinion one of the reasons for this “had to do with the

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very artistic potentialities of the genre” (109). In a short story there is not enough time to develop a very elaborate murder plot. According to Julian Symons the appearance of Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), marked the development of the crime novel. He suggests that she was the first to write a “puzzle story which is solely that” (103). Alison Light, commenting on Christie as a constructor of puzzles, defines this type of detective story as “a kind of conundrum whose pleasure derives from trying to guess the murderer, and which sacrifices characterization and plausibility to the exigencies of suspenseful plotting” (65).

During the 1920’s it became important to observe the rules of the genre. There had to be clues from which the detective drew his conclusions by analysis. Symons in his listing of the rules of the formula says that the criminal must be introduced early in the story, and he must not be one of the servants, as they were not considered

worthwhile except as servants. The murderer must be part of the same social group as the other suspects, and he could be a professional, like a doctor, a lawyer or a secretary.

The social order was fixed, everybody knew his place. The characters were not supposed to be described in any depth, no kind of emotion was advised as this would take the interest away from the plot itself (107).

Symons points out that the classical crime fiction of the Golden Age as a rule ignored the realities of life in the time they were writing about. The unemployment and depression were not issues, neither were the trade unions and the General Strike of 1926, “and when sympathy was expressed for the poor it was not for the unemployed but for those struggling along on a fixed inherited income” (109).

An important point that often has been stressed was that there should be no love interest. Not everybody stuck to this rule. One example which is often cited is E.C.

Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913) in which the detective falls in love with the woman

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he thinks is a murderess. Another writer is of course Dorothy Sayers after she has made Lord Peter Wimsey fall in love with Harriet Vane in Strong Poison (1930). Especially interesting for critics has been that Sayers herself in earlier essays about crime fiction strongly advised against any love story. She can accept that “secondary characters” fall in love as long as this does not interfere with the course of the story, but “far more blameworthy are the heroes who insist on fooling about after young women when they ought to be putting their minds on the job of detection” (Winks 78).

The Golden Age is to many critics synonymous with the English detective novel. Among the names most often mentioned as representative of this time are Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Ngaio Marsh and S. S. Van Dine. Van Dine is American, but he wrote in the traditional English clue-puzzle style.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) published her first detective novel, Whose Body? in 1923. She wrote twelve detective novels, all but one featuring the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In addition she also wrote many short stories. Most critics seem to agree that these are much less interesting than her novels. All her novels are written in the time between the two world wars.

In her Introduction to the anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928) Sayers, when discussing the future of the detective novel, expresses the opinion that it will probably become more closely linked to the novel of manners, removing itself from the rigid formula of the puzzle story. And in 1937 she repeated this in the essay “Gaudy Night.” Looking back on her writing she said that she had always wanted her books to be “novels of manners instead of pure cross-word puzzles,” and goes on to describe how she in some of her novels had introduced various elements in order to achieve this. Symons is no great admirer of Dorothy Sayers: “There is a breathtaking gap here between intention and achievement.” And he continues: “The

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books themselves […] show an increasing pretentiousness, a dismal sentimentality and a slackening of the close plotting that had been her chief virtue” (133).

Michael Holquist seems to be of a different opinion. He comments in his essay

“Whodunit and Other Questions” on a new kind of detective story in the 30’s, which in England was represented by Dorothy Sayers’ “new style”: “The characters were more fully rounded, the settings more ordinary – or at least less formulaic – the plots less implausible. The detective is more human and so are the criminals and the victims”

(163).

Dorothy Sayers had two aims with her detective novels. She wanted to entertain, but at the same time to create solid characters and a real world. As mentioned she argued on various occasions that detective novels ought not to be mere puzzles, but novels of manners. She saw Wilkie Collins as a writer who had managed this

combination. In her Introduction to The Moonstone by Collins she praises him for the way he presents the mystery. In her opinion he has been “very much underrated as regards his competence to create living character and to handle social themes” (ix). I interpret Sayers’ emphasis on the creation of living characters and the handling of social themes as the essence of what she meant by a “novel of manners.”

The aim of my thesis is to examine Dorothy Sayers’ detective novels as a mixed genre, combining the puzzle with the novel of manners as she conceived it; where the characters are not mere pawns to drive the mystery plot forward, but are portrayed as

“living” individuals involved in serious social issues and being capable of development.

I will further explore to what extent social and political issues treated in her novels reflect British society at the time they were written. I will concentrate on five texts representing the beginning, middle and end of her career as a writer of detective fiction, and which mark a change of focus from mystery to manners. Among the issues I want

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to explore are anti-Semitism and class in Whose Body?, the legacy of the Great War and modern science in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, the question of the

“surplus” women and spiritualism in Unnatural Death and Strong Poison, and finally the role of women in society in Gaudy Night .

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Chapter 1. Whose Body?

Dorothy L. Sayers graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1915 with first-class honours in modern and medieval languages, but she did not receive her degree until 1920, at the historic ceremony when Oxford’s first women graduates were honoured.

Sayers started writing crime fiction in the 1920’s. Her first novel Whose Body?

was published in 1923. At that time detective stories were extremely popular, and Sayers herself was an avid reader of puzzles. She expressed the opinion that detective novels ought to develop into something more than mere puzzles. At one time she wrote that “novelists never present the story as an isolated episode existing solely in virtue of its relation to the mechanics of detection. They are interested in the social background, in manners and morals, in the depiction and interplay of character” (Gaillard 26). When she started writing, her intention was to make her novels more than just conventional puzzles. On the other hand there seems to be no doubt that she needed the money.

Although she enjoyed writing, she says in one of her letters to her parents while she was looking for a publisher for Whose Body?, “there is a market for detective literature if one can get in, and he [Lord Peter] might go some way towards providing bread and cheese” (Brabazon 87).

Whose Body? is constructed as a puzzle, but there are also interesting characters, and the reader gets an impression of some of the social issues in England at the time. In addition to the main character, the sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, several of the other characters introduced in this first novel also appear in later books. Most important of these are his man-servant Mervyn Bunter, his friend, Police Inspector Charles Parker, and his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver.

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Lord Peter Wimsey lives in a luxurious flat in London with his servant Bunter.

He is a wealthy aristocrat, and in the middle of his thirties in this first novel. Dorothy Sayers, herself coming from a middle-class family, enjoyed writing about the

aristocracy and giving Lord Peter the money and luxury that she did not have herself.

Wimsey is an Oxford graduate, a connoisseur of food and drink, a good cricketer, plays the piano, and is a collector of incunabula. His hobby is criminal investigation, and being of independent means he is in the position that he can carry out investigations whenever he deems it necessary without any professional obligations. He has a mannered speech and a gift for talking piffle, and is on the whole presented as a silly- ass-about-town. Bunter is Wimsey’s correct Jeeves-like “man,” and also his assistant at times. He photographs fingerprints, interrogates servants and helps with chasing clues.

Inspector Parker is employed by Scotland Yard and not as free to carry out

investigations as his friend Wimsey. They cooperate on cases. Some years later Parker becomes Chief Inspector and also Wimsey’s brother- in-law by marrying his sister Mary. Lord Peter’s mother the Dowager Duchess is living on the family estate in Norfolk and provides maternal support. Her shrewdness and good common sense are masked by her endless monologues with numerous associations.

The first pages of Whose Body? introduce the reader to Wimsey, Bunter and the Duchess through some lively dialogue. Wimsey is on his way to a book sale, but discovers that he has forgotten the catalogue. Returning in the taxi to the flat which, incidentally, has the address 110A Piccadilly, a clear reference to Sherlock Holmes, he hears Bunter speaking on the telephone. He is told that “Her Grace has just called up from Denver, my lord. I was just saying your lordship had gone to the sale when I heard your lordship’s latchkey” (8). Wimsey’s mother informs him that she has been told by the vicar’s wife that the architect who was supposed to come up that morning to do

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some work on the church roof, has rung up to say he could not come. “He was so upset, poor little man. He’d found a dead body in his bath” (8). It appears that the body was of a man, naked except for a pair of pince-nez, “Mrs. Throgmorton positively blushed when she was telling me. I’m afraid people do get a little narrow-minded in country vicarages” (9). The Duchess wants Wimsey to go down to South West London where Mr. Thipps and his mother live to see “if there is anything we can do” (9). Wimsey grins, because “The Duchess was always of the greatest assistance to his hobby of criminal assistance, though she never alluded to it, and maintained a polite fiction of its non-existence” (9). And he answers in his flippant way:

‘Well, thanks awfully for tellin’ me. I think I’ll send Bunter to the sale and toddle round to Battersea now an’ try and console the poor little beast.’ [. . .]

‘Bunter!’ ‘Yes, my lord.’ ‘Her Grace tells me that a respectable Battersea architect has discovered a dead man in his bath.’ ‘Indeed, my lord? That’s very gratifying.’ ‘Very, Bunter. Your choice of words is unerring. I wish Eton and Balliol had done as much for me.” (9)

This is an example of the style of the first Wimsey book, a style many have found delightful. One immediately associates the dialogue between Wimsey and Bunter with Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Having sent Bunter off to the sale, Wimsey has to attend to his dressing by himself, muttering that he has to change his clothes from top-hat and frock-coat because Thipps might mistake him for the undertaker, “a grey suit, I fancy, neat but not gaudy, with a hat to tone suits my other self better. Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman” (10). And the narrator observes that “he was changing with a rapidity one might not have expected from a man of his mannerisms” (11). Here is the first signal that Wimsey’s flippant manner may be a disguise. His dressing finishes with a monocle

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which the reader later learns is a strong magnifying glass, a walking stick is a measuring rod which also contains a sword and a compass in the head, and a flat silver matchbox serves as a torch when he later examines the body.

The body in the bath is a mystery, nobody seems to know how it got there and who it is. The verdict at the inquest is that the man died due to a blow on the cervical spine, but how the injury was inflicted remains unclear. Very soon the body gets linked to the disappearance that same morning of the financier Sir Reuben Levy.

Inspector Parker is investigating this case. Both he and Wimsey are, however, convinced that the body in the bath is not Sir Reuben. Wimsey calls the idea

“preposterous,” the reason apparently being that the body is uncircumcised. Several critics have commented on this. According to biographer Barbara Reynolds, Sayers had at first been more explicit about this point, but was asked by the publishers to be more discreet (101).

A conventional puzzle needs to have red herrings. Whose Body? has several, the most central one being the pair of gold pince-nez. Lord Peter chases the clue by putting an advertisement in The Times about it, a method commonly used by Sherlock Holmes in his investigations. Upon getting an answer, Bunter and Wimsey head off to Salisbury.

The excursion turns out to be an embarrassing failure, the owner of the pince-nez is a respectable solicitor in his eighties with a bad leg, who had lost his glasses on a trip to London the week before. At the end of the novel the villain himself tells how he had found them at Victoria Station and later got the idea of putting it on the body’s nose, “I saw what distinction they would lend his appearance, besides making it more

misleading” (181).

Although the body in the bath is not Sir Reuben Levy, there is a connection between the two, and this connection also provides the solution to the mystery. Thipps’s

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flat where the body was found is in a building which is situated next to a large hospital and its dissection room. As it becomes clear that the body must have been carried over the roof and then brought through the bathroom window, the surgeon in charge of the dissection room, the famous Sir Julian Freke, catches the interest of Lord Peter.

Wimsey solves the case. He discovers that the body in the bath is a vagrant who had died in one of the workhouses after an accident, and had been brought to the hospital for dissection purposes. Freke has murdered Levy and substituted his body for the other body which was meant for dissection by the medical students.

Reynolds is of the opinion that Whose Body? is the most gruesome of all Sayers’

novels. In addition to the details about what was done in the dissection room, there is also a description of the scene where Sir Reuben in his dissected state is exhumed for identification by his widow. Reynolds suggests that Sayers “wanted to make it clear from the outset that, though a woman, she intended no simpering evasion of reality”

(178).

Sayers started writing Whose Body? in 1921 when Britain still suffered from the aftermath of the Great War. Halfway through the novel the readers are confronted with a surprising example of this. Lord Peter is busy collecting clues and is well on his way to begin to understand what has happened. We have heard about the impressive Sir Julian Freke from various angles, as the brilliant scientist and surgeon, as the author of a new book about the physiological basis of the conscience, as the old acquaintance of Wimsey’s mother, and somewhat unexpectedly, as the young rejected suitor of the girl who instead eloped with and married Reuben Levy.

Wimsey is sitting late at night by himself thinking and reasoning, feeling that the solution is in his subconscious, only he is unable to reach it. Sitting there reading

Freke’s book about conscience, the solution suddenly strikes him. To illustrate this

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Sayers employs the example of the game where one is supposed to make a word of a jumble of letters, in this case COSSSSRI. Instead of slowly trying to arrange the letters in various ways, one stares at the letters, and suddenly “the combination SCISSORS presents itself with calm certainty” (122).

All of a sudden Wimsey knew how things had been done, and that Sir Julian was the villain. And then, to the reader’s surprise, Lord Peter Wimsey goes all to pieces, wakes up Bunter and babbles about water, guns and trenches. “No, no, it’s all right, Major – don’t you worry” (122), said the faithful servant, and after having put Wimsey to bed, Sergeant Bunter said to himself: “thought we’d had the last of these attacks”

(125). The next morning the Duchess turns up and takes her son with her to Denver for the weekend. But not before he, via Inspector Parker, has started to wind up the case.

Sayers brings up themes from the war in most of her novels, and in her last Wimsey book, Busman’s Honeymoon, she returns to his shell shock. The Duchess tells his wife Harriet about Bunter and Wimsey having been in the same unit during the war and how Bunter had saved Wimsey from being buried after an attack by the Germans. It was also Bunter, entering Lord Peter’s service after the war, who was the person mainly responsible for getting Wimsey back on his feet. In commenting on Wimsey’s war record, Robert Kuhn McGregor argues that this was one of the reasons why Lord Peter became so popular with a large part of the detective-reading public in Britain: “By placing him in the frontlines as a major who actually suffered shell shock, Sayers preserved the credibility of his lordly upbringing and education while giving him a real experience of horror shared by millions” (28).

Science was playing an increasingly important role in society in Britain. In Sir Julian Freke, Sayers has created the famous scientist who uses his brilliance to help mankind, but also to ruthlessly take care of his own interests. There are several clues to

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his character (apart from the name!).When he discusses his work with Parker, he says that dissection is the basis of all good theory and all correct diagnosis. This may not be very controversial, but he continues: “One must keep one’s hand and eye in training.

This place is far more important to me than Harley Street, and some day I shall abandon my consulting practice altogether, and settle down here to cut up my subjects and write my books in peace. So many things in this life is a waste of time, Mr. Parker” (Body 100). He believes that all mental disturbances are due to damaged brain cells, in other words a perfect example of biological determinism. Conscience is, the way Freke sees it, an unnecessary hindrance in doing what you want.

In Sir Julian’s confession letter to Wimsey the reader gets a deeper understanding of the famous scientist’s mind and how it works. Ever since Levy married the girl Freke wanted, he has waited for the right moment to get his revenge.

The way he sees it, the only difficulty in a murder is the disposal of the body. That is why he constructed the plan of substituting one body for the other. He killed Levy with a poker from behind, and inflicted on him a similar injury to that of the pauper, breaking the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. “It was delicate work calculating the exact force necessary to kill him without breaking the skin, but my professional experience was useful to me” (176).

Freke had in fact not had any special thoughts about where to dispose of the body of the pauper, but he gets the bright idea of leaving it with Thipps, “I remembered his silly face, and his silly chatter about vivisection. It occurred to me pleasantly how delightful it would be to deposit my parcel with him and see what he made of it” (181).

Then the letter continues with the description of the dissection of Sir Julian, “I took off Levy’s head and started to open up the face. In twenty minutes his own wife would not have recognised him” (182). All this was done during the night and early

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morning before anybody else came to the dissection room. The body lying there waiting for further dissection by the medical students was still supposed to be the pauper that was brought in the day before. In their work with the mystery Wimsey and Parker struck up an acquaintance with Piggott, one of the medical students who had been in the dissection room the day in question. They get him to describe the work they had been doing that day, “I’d asked for an arm specially because I was rather weak in arms, and Watts – that’s the attendant – had promised to save me one”(143). When Wimsey asks if he had seen the head, he says no, because “old Freke bagged the head himself” (142).

On Wimsey’s question about what Freke did to the head he says that “he called us up and gave us a jaw on spinal haemorrhage and nervous lesions” (142). There are certainly similarities between Freke and Frankenstein!

In his confession letter Freke says that he is going to die by his own hand. He asks Wimsey to see to it that his body is given to his hospital for dissection, “I feel sure that my brain will be of interest to the scientific world” (183). As it happens he is caught just before he is able to carry out his intention, and Wimsey muses: “all that coolness, all those brains – and then he couldn’t resist writing to show how clever he was, even to keep his head out of the noose” (183).

Sir Julian Freke is the brilliant researcher who thinks he can manage everything by his intellect. Ironically, what becomes his fate is that he can never forget being humiliated as a young man. “Sex is every man’s loco spot” observes Wimsey (148), bringing in a bit of Freud. Kuhn McGregor discusses Sayers’ use of science as a theme in Whose Body? and later novels. He argues that her message is that science has resulted in great accomplishments, but one has to watch out for scientists (32). This point seems to especially concern medical scientists, which she also brings into her later novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

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Dorothy Sayers has by some critics been accused of anti-Semitism. There certainly are numerous places in Whose Body? where the focus is on Jews. The first time is when Parker tells Wimsey about the disappearance of Levy, “I went round to see if the Semitic-looking stranger in Mr. Thipps’s bath was by any extraordinary chance Sir Robert Levy” (21). The reader learns later that Freke had indeed been looking for a body which resembled Levy, in order to carry out his plan about substituting the body in the dissection room for Sir Julian. Later Wimsey says that “You shall see my body to- night, Parker, and I’ll look for your wandering Jew to-morrow” (34). When the Duchess tells Wimsey the story about how Mrs. Levy’s parents had objected to her marrying a Jew, she continues in her rambling manner:

I’m sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I’d much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies, and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast. (41)

And when Bunter is trying to get some information about Levy from his servants one of them says:

I don’t hold with Hebrews as a rule, Mr. Bunter, and of course I understand that you may find it to your advantage to be in a titled family, but there’s less

thought of that these days, and I will say, for a self-made man, no one could call Sir Reuben vulgar. (47)

And Bunter assents: “A good Jew can be a good man, that’s what I’ve always said”

(47). Parker and Wimsey talk about Freke and his thirst for revenge, “It isn’t the girl Freke would bother about - it’s having his aristocratic nose put out of joint by a little Jewish nobody” (148). The medical students refer to the body in the dissecting room as

“the old Sheeny” (142). Incidentally, since they did not see the head they were probably

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thinking of the circumcision. And Freke is saying the following in his confession letter when telling about the meeting with Levy and the possibility of buying some stocks,

“And he shrugged up his shoulders and looked like a pawnbroker” (173).

Sayers’ authorized biographer, James Brabazon, goes to considerable length in describing her feelings about Jews, maintaining that she was consciously anti-Semitic (216-219). Carolyn Heilbrun criticises Brabazon for his “complete acceptance” of this in her essay “Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines.” She suggests that

“Sayers, in fact, disliked the Jewish religion because of its refusal to recognize Jesus as the saviour” (11). Sayers herself was, according to Kuhn McGregor, surprised at being accused of anti-Semitism. In commenting on all the Jewish stereotyping found in the novel, he notes that everyone in the novel accepts it without thought or comment: “Even a woman as educated and sensitive to the human condition as Dorothy L. Sayers could include it in a novel as natural and innocuous behaviour [...] Unconscious anti-Semitism was a part of life, a condition of mind, an expression of the culture” (31).

Colin Watson observes that the British public at the time was “generally unaware of the ugliness of ethnic intolerance” (124). He comments on Sidney Horler, another author of crime fiction, who was “only one of several popular authors of the period who put anti-Semitic sentiments into print, and there is nothing to suggest that their assumption of the approval of their readers was misplaced. The Jew was, without question, the favourite of British middle class scorn” (135). One may conclude that the cited examples in Whose Body?, which to the reader of today certainly seem anti- Semitic, may have been less so to Sayers’ contemporary audience.

In England in the early 1920s class ideology was still a question of everybody

“adhering to the position in which it had pleased God to place one,” as Carolyn Heilbrun puts it in her book Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (240). Social

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hierarchy, although slowly disappearing, was still present, and in Whose Body? there are numerous examples of its existence. The unfortunate Mr. Thipps, in whose bath the body was found, is constantly referred to as “little” by Lord Peter and his mother the Duchess, “little Mr. Thipps,” “the little architect man,” “poor little man,” “a nice little man,” “poor little beast” (8-9), “his weak little eye-lids” (11). Thipps is apparently not a tall man, but this constant referral to him as “little” may easily be seen as indicating his status as much as his size. This is confirmed by quoting his frequent “reely.” Both Thipps and his deaf mother, who by the way is a delightful character, are also dropping their h’s, which adds to the picture of class differences. When the Duchess whispers comments to Parker during the inquest, she says this about the jury, “and what unfinished-looking faces they have – so characteristic, I always think, of the lower middle-class” (85), which was probably not a shocking utterance from a representative of the aristocracy at the time.

Employing servants was still the rule among both the upper and middle class.

When Wimsey arrives at Denver Castle in the middle of the night with Mrs. Thipps, and tells his mother that he has to leave after a couple of hours sleep and she says “I’ll send up your breakfast at half past six, dear” (42), there is no doubt that this will be done by the servants, she does not even question the possibility of this not being done.

What about Bunter? Watson in his book Snobbery with Violence somewhat acidly states that:

The most famous servant created by any detection writer is Bunter, Lord Peter Wimsey’s man – if man, indeed, is the word for a being who epitomized everything Dorothy Sayers considered desirable in a director of wordly affairs.

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And he continues: “He is a sort of a priest, charged with the maintenance of ritual and ornament which reflect the immutability of the social structure” (146). Watson, who considers Sayers snobbish, nevertheless argues that “her phrasing of many of the

Wimsey and Bunter passages shows that she enjoyed writing them and intended them to entertain” (148).

Bunter, who has been asked by Wimsey to get friendly with Freke’s servants in order to find out what happened during the night when the body was found, writes a letter to Wimsey at Denver, and in the middle of reporting what he got out of

Cummings, Freke’s valet, he puts in the following:

May I take this opportunity of expressing my grateful appreciation of your lordship’s excellent taste in food, drink and dress? It is, if I may say so, more than a pleasure – it is an education, to valet and buttle your lordship. (130)

It is very likely that passages like these are what Watson has in mind when he talks about “the pomposities of a late Victorian butler,” which Sayers lets Bunter utter.

Watson also argues that these pomposities were “innocent of social criticism” (148).

That there also was hierarchy among servants is shown through Bunter when he comments on Cummings’ taste in music and drink, “I may say that his views on women and the stage were such as I should have expected from a man who would smoke with your lordship’s port” (130).

In Whose Body? Bunter seems to be a man with no life outside his job at 110A Piccadilly. But in Sayers’ next book, Clouds of Witness, both Lord Peter and the readers are taken by surprise. Wimsey and Bunter are talking:

‘Yes, my lord. My old mother –‘ ‘Your old mother, Bunter? I didn’t know you had one. I always imagined you were turned out ready-made so to speak. ‘Scuse me. Infernally rude of me. Beg your pardon, I’m sure.’ ‘Not at all, my lord. My

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mother lives in Kent, my lord, near Maidstone. Seventy-five, my lord, and an extremely active woman for her years, if you’ll excuse my mentioning it. I was one of seven.’ (82)

Bunter has been in Wimsey’s service at least five years, and it seems nearly incredible that his employer has known nothing about Bunter’s relatives, in spite of the existing inequality. Wimsey now, however, “stretched out his hand impulsively, but Mr. Bunter was too well trained to see it” (83). Bunter knows his place.

Inspector Parker, who has “a modest, though sufficient, salary drawn from the pockets of the British tax-payer,” has no living-in servant, but a woman “who did for him by the day,” (Body 62), and his breakfast is slightly less luxurious than the one he sometimes gets at Lord Peter’s, seeming often to consist of burnt porridge. His modest bachelor flat has, in the style of many London flats, a combined bathroom and kitchen.

In other words, Parker’s life-style is very much simpler than Lord Peter’s, a life similar to Sayers herself at the time. He is a contrast to Lord Peter’s seemingly irresponsible way of life, and in fact Parker once tells his friend that “you’ll never become a professional till you learn to do a little work, Wimsey” (53).

According to Dawson Gaillard, Whose Body? was called “the maddest, jolliest crime story of recent memory” by The Nation when it was published (29). Looking back in 1937 on her detective novels, Sayers in her essay “Gaudy Night” repeats what she had said at the start of her career about wanting to produce something less like a conventional detective story, and more like a novel. But when she now had re-read Whose Body? she felt that “it is conventional to the last degree […] because one cannot write a novel unless one has something to say about life, and I had nothing to say about it, because I knew nothing” (208). This may seem too self-critical. The novel is a conventional puzzle, but with sustained suspense and intriguing plot devices,

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challenging the reader. Whose Body? contains tedious passages and lengthy

speculations, such as Wimsey describing Hypotheses A, B, C, D, or E to Parker. But they are not many, the style of the larger part of the novel is entertaining and witty with a lively dialogue.

Sayers may have overdone the Bertram Woosterism of Lord Peter Wimsey. But there are several signs of a more rounded character, which will be more developed in later novels, making Lord Peter more “human.” There are secondary characters, like that of Lord Peter’s mother, the Duchess, who are better developed. Her rambling monologues are a stream-of-consciousness parody. The readers also get a fair

understanding of several of the other supporting characters, among them Thipps with his unfortunate nightclub experience, the medical student Piggott, and of course Freke, the villain.

Although the main reason why Dorothy Sayers started writing detective fiction was that she hoped to make some money, this first novel is an entertaining puzzle with good attempts at characterization. The novel gives an interesting picture of “manners and morals” in England at the time which will be further developed in her later novels.

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Chapter 2. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is the fourth book in the Wimsey series, published in 1928. In addition to Lord Peter Wimsey, the only other characters from Whose Body? are Bunter and Inspector Parker. The family solicitor Murbles plays an important role. Most other characters have directly or indirectly something to do with the Bellona Club, which is a club for war veterans in the centre of London. Apart from the detective plot the main theme centres around the characters’ reactions and behaviour in relation to the Great War.

Ninety-year old General Fentiman is found dead in his armchair in the Club on Armistice Day, presumably because of a heart attack. Judging from the state of the rigor mortis he has been dead for several hours, but nobody has noticed, the club members are used to see him sitting there. Because inheritance is an issue, the question of establishing the time of death becomes important. The brothers George and Robert Fentiman, both war veterans and grandsons of the diseased, will inherit quite a large sum of money if the General dies after his sister Felicity. As it happens, Felicity dies that same morning. Lord Peter Wimsey is asked by Murbles, the Fentiman’s family solicitor, to try to investigate this. Wimsey discovers that it is a case of murder. General Fentiman has died because of a strong dose of digitalin, and the investigation centers round the time of death in addition to disclosing the murderer. General Fentiman had in fact died the night before, but his grandson Robert, who did not know that he was poisoned, had tampered with the body to make it look as if he had died that same

morning. He put the body in the telephone cabinet near the library overnight, and during the two minutes’ Armistice silence, when everybody was either out in the street or standing on the balcony, he carried him over to his chair and put a newspaper in his

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hands. It turns out that the murderer is Doctor Penberthy, who besides being the Club doctor, has a practice in Harley Street. He is interested in “glands” and wants to open a clinic. Only he needs money, and is secretly engaged to Ann Dorland, who is Felicity’s ward and heiress.

The special atmosphere at the Bellona Club is conveyed during the first few pages of the novel. Wimsey meets Captain George Fentiman, who asks him what he is doing in this “morgue.” He says that the place reminds him of a cartoon in Punch:

“Waiter, take away Lord Whatsisname, he’s been dead two days.” He goes on to comment on his grandfather who comes in every morning and “becomes part of the furniture till the evening.” And he adds: “I wish to God Jerry had put me out with the rest of ‘em. What’s the good of coming through for this sort of thing?” (1). And

Wimsey seems to sympathize to a certain extent, saying that “all this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don’t it?” (1).

The readers understand that George Fentiman is somewhat mentally unstable due to war experiences, and the scene is set for the discovery of the dead body. George is very bitter: “A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income tax” (2). Fentiman’s voice rises during these complaints and “A shocked veteran, till then invisible in a neighbouring armchair, poked out a lean head like a tortoise and said ‘Sh’ viperishly” (2). Sayers’

balance between the serious and the witty is here well exemplified.

While Wimsey and George are still talking, the discovery of the dead general is made by another member who goes over to say hello. When George Fentiman realizes that his grandfather has been sitting dead in his chair without him or anybody else noticing, he loses all control:

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Fentiman laughed. Peal after hysterical peal shook his throat. All round the room scandalised Bellonians creaked to their gouty feet, shocked by the unmannerly noise.‘Take him away!’ said Fentiman, ‘take him away. He’s been dead two days! So are you! So am I! We’re all dead, and we never noticed it!’ (5)

The reactions to the “unpleasantness” among the members in the club may be seen as an illustration of the generation gap. In Gaillard’s opinion the description of the older club members’ reaction to the General’s death satirizes a post-war society that bows to their dead traditions, an example of Sayers’ wish to combine manners and mystery (55).

Many of the members were veterans from the Boer War, some, like General Fentiman, even from the Crimean. As the narrator observes:

It is doubtful which occurrence was more disagreeable to the senior members of the Bellona Club – the grotesque death of General Fentiman in their midst or the indecent neurasthenia of his grandson. Only the younger men felt no sense of outrage, they knew too much. (Bellona 6)

The above passage, according to Terrance Lewis, is an example of “us versus them,”

“showing that those who had fought in the front lines during the war would always look at life differently” (2). This “versus habit,” as Paul Fussell calls it in his book The Great War and Modern Memory (79), can also be applied to show the dichotomy between those who fought in the war and those who stayed at home.

The First World War, or The Great War as it is often called, was a war with tremendous violence and human suffering. Huge advances in military technology transformed the battlefield, and the conditions for the men in the trenches were horrendous. Three quarters of a million men from the United Kingdom were killed.

And according to A. J. P. Taylor, “as a further scar, the war left one million and a half men who were permanently weakened by wounds or the effect of gas” (120).

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Captain George Fentiman in Bellona Club is a prime example of a man with war injuries. The reader gets a thorough insight into his problems when Wimsey visits him and his wife Sheila. The Fentimans rent a two room flat, sharing kitchen and bathroom with other tenants. Not long after Wimsey has arrived things start to get unpleasant. The embittered George takes every opportunity to complain about things. Sheila, although pretty, has “an appearance of worry and ill-health” (64). Although she is working and he is at home and out-of work, George keeps accusing Sheila of not having done this and that in the home. When she asks him why he has not spoken to the charlady about the coal, commenting that she herself has usually gone by the time the woman comes in, George immediately jumps at her, “Oh, yes I know. You needn’t keep on rubbing it in about your having to go out to work” (65). A similar pattern is seen every time the conversation turns in the direction of the couple’s life situation. In addition to being unemployed, George Fentiman has trouble with his “gassed-out” stomach, and his nerves are on edge. Several critics have pointed out that in describing this too common situation in England at the time, Sayers also drew on her own experience, having married a man with similar problems.

The Fentimans’ money worries are more serious than just the problem of living on a meagre salary. Sheila had originally tried to start a teashop and to be able to do this they had borrowed money from a “loan-shark.” The teashop was no success and they are now in considerable debt to this man. Terrance Lewis observes that this particular problem is typical of what at the time was known as the Slump (37).

Captain George Fentiman is one of the “damaged” men from the war, and as Samuel Hynes says in A War Imagined, “ex-soldiers figure prominently in post-war fiction.” But according to Hynes, the damaged ones are found in more serious novels, while in “popular novels they appear as soldier-heroes” (356). Considering that

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detective novels are regarded as belonging to popular fiction, George Fentiman is certainly an exception to this rule. The extent of his damage is becoming still more evident at the end of the novel when he disappears from home following the disclosing of his grandfather’s murder. Formerly he has had frequent fits of odd behaviour which have “generally ended in his going off and wandering about in a distraught manner for several days, sometimes with partial and occasionally with complete temporary loss of memory” (Bellona 203). When he is found he is suffering from the delusion that he has killed his grandfather. As the police surgeon observes, “A hundred years ago they’d have called it diabolic possession, but we know better” (256).

Major Robert Fentiman, George’s elder brother, does not appear to suffer from any war injuries. His brother says that “he’s so thick-skinned; the regular unimaginative Briton. I believe Robert would cheerfully go through another five years of war and think it all a very good rag” (99). The way he behaves after having found his grandfather dead the night before, and realizing that he might lose his inheritance, certainly fits with the above description. By concealing the dead body of General Fentiman in the telephone cabinet overnight, and then transferring him to his usual armchair during the two minutes’ silence the next morning, he hopes to make it look as if the General has recently died. Robert’s reactions when he is told by Murbles and Wimsey that they know, further heightens the impression given:

Fentiman flung himself into a chair, slapping his thigh and roaring with laughter.

‘I might have known you’d be on to it,’ he gasped; ‘but it was a damn’ good joke, wasn’t it? Good lord! I couldn’t help chuckling to myself, you know. To think of all those refrigerated old imbeciles at the Club sittin’ solemnly round there, and comin’ in and noddin’ to the old Guv’nor like so many mandarins, when he was as dead as a door-nail all the time. That leg of his was a bit of a slip-up, of course, but that was an accident.’ (149).

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“That leg” refers to the fact that he had had to forcibly bend the knee to get the body out of the cabinet after the rigor mortis had set in. This is also one of the reasons why Wimsey realizes that the body had been tampered with after the time of death.

Whether Robert’s lack of finer feelings is a reaction to his war experiences is not quite clear. He is earlier referred to as “a regular army type,” being “of the old Fentiman stock” (14). Kuhn McGregor, however, has no doubts that Robert “came away from the war a damaged soul. His sense of gentlemanly honor was gone.” To him both brothers are examples of “men desperately wounded deep in their emotions” (71). Terrance Lewis does not argue the point about Robert’s war damage as strongly, but observes that “many of those qualities which made Robert such an excellent officer in time of war were not suited for peacetime Britain” (2).

There are several examples of what may be called a clash between generations in post-war Britain in the novel. When Murbles is told by Wimsey that the body was put in the armchair during the two minutes’ silence he is horror-struck: “God bless my soul!

How abominable! How – how blasphemous. Really I cannot find words. This is the most disgraceful thing I ever heard of ” (Bellona 133). And later, after having listened to Robert telling about his handling of the body, he gives him directly his opinion “in an awful voice: […] ‘having employed those sacred moments when every thought should have been consecrated - .‘Oh, punk!’ interrupted Robert rudely. ‘My old pals are none the worse because I did a little bit of self-help’[…]” (151).

Another, though less brutal, example of the clash of generations is when George talks to Wimsey about his grandfather:

The old man – damn it all, I know he was in the Crimea, but he’s no idea what a real war‘s like. He thinks things can go on just as they did half a century ago. I dare say he never did behave as I do. Anyway, I know he never had to go to his wife for pocket-money, let alone having the inside gassed out of him. Coming

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preaching to me – and I couldn’t say anything, because he was so confoundedly old, you know. (98)

Wimsey understands how George feels, and he seems to be of the same opinion as most of the other war veterans as regards Armistice Day: “it’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it don’t do to say so” (1). And “it don’t do to say so”

because he knows that to the general public the day is important. When he learns that the club doorman had not been on duty that morning because he was given permission to attend the ceremony, he graciously agrees: “Naturally, you would be there […] it wouldn’t have done to miss the Cenotaph” (27). On the other hand he deems it necessary, when kind old Murbles says that George Fentiman has inherited “a weakly strain,” to politely defend him, because he “knew better than the old solicitor the kind of mental and physical strain George Fentiman had undergone. […] ‘And then he was gassed and all that, you know,’ he added apologetically” (14).

One may wonder whether the reason Wimsey feels he has to apologize for George’s condition also has to do with his own nervous troubles. However, in Bellona Club Wimsey does not have any breakdown as opposed to the one in Whose Body?. The only time his shell-shock is touched upon is when he speaks to Ann Dorland trying to console her. He tells her of his time in a nursing home right after the war, when he played Patience the whole time to keep his mind off other things (237).

The relationship between the sexes changed after the war. Women had got used to working outside the home, and many of them were reluctant to go back to domestic service. Many men had difficulties accepting this. George Fentiman is one of them: “No wonder a man can’t get a decent job these days, with these hard-mouthed, cigarette-

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smoking females all over the place, pretending they’re geniuses and business women and all the rest of it” (71). He even scorns poor Ann Dorland because she in addition to being a companion has taken up painting, “Why couldn’t she be a companion? In the old days heaps of unmarried women were companions “ (71). George resents the new situation, and he blames the women for his own unemployment. He keeps nagging his wife because she is the one who supports the family. As a matter of fact Sheila is not a career woman, in an unfortunate moment she admits that she does not want to go out to work. This of course does not improve George’s mood. The Fentimans are one of many married couples after the war in a similar position, the husband being unable to work due to physical or mental disability. Sayers deals more with the “problem” of the unmarried women after the war in some of her other novels. This will be discussed in a later chapter.

Much of what is described in Bellona Club does not have any direct connection with the puzzle, but one important clue to the solution of the crime, nicely woven into the story, is the missing poppy on General Fentiman’s clothes. This makes Wimsey understand that the General could not have come in that same morning, as it would have been unthinkable for a man like the General not to wear his poppy on Remembrance Sunday. Together with the point about the exact time when the body was put in the armchair, the rituals and “manners” around this particular Day plays an important role in the novel.

Concerning the crime plot itself there are quite a few similarities to Whose Body?. In Bellona Club the murderer is also a medical man. Doctor Penberthy is not too well off. He has been an army surgeon and is now sharing a practice with two other doctors in Harley Street in addition to attending to the veterans in the Bellona Club. He wants to engage himself in research on glands. Ductless glands is “ever so much more

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up-to-date than vitamins,” as Wimsey’s friend Marjorie writes to him in a letter (141).

At the fashionable party where Penberthy is giving a talk on glands, the reader is presented with various characters’ opinion about glandular theory. Penberthy wants to establish a clinic “to make everybody good by glands,” as the hostess puts it (168).

Penberthy himself, talking to Wimsey, believes that “it’s the Science of the future, as they say in the press. There really isn’t any doubt about that. It puts biology in quite a new light” (171). Had it not been for the exhumation of General Fentiman, he might have succeeded. Penberthy, just as ambitious as Freke in Whose Body, is not, however, as callous. When Wimsey makes it clear that he knows everything, and suggests that Penberthy write a confession to clear Ann Dorland of suspicion, he agrees. “And then?”

he asks. “Then do as you like. In your place I know what I should do,” answers Wimsey (260). And Penberthy commits suicide by shooting himself in the Club library with a gun supplied by old Colonel Marchbanks, one of the members. One more

“unpleasantness” has occurred at the Bellona Club.

Comparing Whose Body? and Bellona Club Kuhn McGregor repeats his opinion of Sayers being concerned with “the dangers of unregulated science […] If nerves and glands were news, the public needed to be wary” (74). Incidentally, McGregor as well as other critics draw attention to Sayers’ own unfortunate experiences with doctors when she was an adolescent, suggesting that her creation of villains belonging to the medical profession may be looked upon as a form of revenge for her sufferings then.

While such a possibility can not be completely rejected, it seems a minor reason. Sayers must be credited for having written about scientific themes that were in the news at the time, and which the public took a great interest in.

At the same time this part may also be seen as a satire on modern biology. The passages describing the exhumation scene, similar to the one in Whose Body?, have

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aspects of comedy of manners. Arriving at the cemetery Wimsey asks Murbles, “When does the ceremony take place? Quietly, I take it? No flowers?” (140). Comparing exhumations to funerals, the narrator observes:

However depressing the thud of earth on the coffin-lid may be, it is music compared to the rattle of gravel and thump of spades which herald a premature and unreverend resurrection, enveloped in clouds of formalin and without benefit of clergy. (141)

The description of the autopsy continues in the same vein:

‘D’you mind holding while I get this ligature on? Ta.’ (Snip, snip.) ‘The jars are just behind you. Thanks. Look out! You’ll have it over. Ha! ha! that was a near thing […] better have a look at the brain while we’re about it, I suppose.

Have you got the large saw?’ (143)

Murbles finds “the medical men” callous, while Wimsey comments that this is a job they do several times a week.

The Wimsey character in Bellona Club is still at times portrayed as a Wooster type, in fact he once says to George Fentiman that people think he is “too well-off to have any brains” (3). He still utters sentences like “au contraire, as the man said in the Bay of Biscay when they asked if he’d dined” (37) and when Bunter asks him whether the new case is promising he answers that “it has its points. So has a porcupine […] Be at great pains, Bunter, to cultivate a detached look at life. Take example by the

bloodhound, who will follow up with equal and impartial zest the trail of a parricide or of a bottle of aniseed” (23). Bunter of course says that he will bear it in mind. At other times Wimsey is the superdetective, as when he discusses the state of rigor mortis with Dr. Penberthy and “suddenly turning and looking the other straight in the face. The change in him was almost startling – it was as if a steel blade had whipped suddenly out of its velvet scabbard” (32). The reader is left in no uncertainty about Wimsey’s

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qualities! Neither is Marjorie Phelps: “Peter Wimsey! You sit there, looking a perfectly well-bred imbecile, and then in the most underhand way you twist people into doing things they ought to blush for. No wonder you detect things” (178).

Bunter and Parker are given less space in this novel than in Whose Body? But the pattern with Wimsey and Bunter is the same, changing between dialogue and

Bunter’s assistance, in this case photography inside the Bellona Club. Parker comes into the case fairly late, Wimsey does most of the detecting, and in fact the two have a couple of serious rows concerning how to interpret some of the evidence. Though an unpleasant experience, it may also be regarded as a deepened relationship between the two. The quarrels have to do to do with the suspects, especially the Fentiman brothers and Ann Dorland. When it comes to Dorland, everybody at one time seems to believe her guilty except Wimsey, and he shows considerable psychological insight in his handling of her. This human touch is also much in evidence in the way he supports Sheila in her difficulties with her husband. The Lord Peter character seems to have taken on new dimensions.

From 1928-1931 a lot of war literature was published in England. Sayers’

Bellona Club was in fact one of the first that treated the effects of the war, and Lewis argues that the war themes “fit right in with what the audience wanted” (115). He is of the opinion that her novel “in many ways shows the attitudes of the British Society towards the war better than the famous books about the War which were just being published in 1928” (3). Also Valerie Pitt is of a similar opinion: “The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club […] assumes as axiomatic the unrecognized conflict between those who were there and those who were not” (107).

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Sayers’ fourth novel is a mixture of the witty and the serious, it balances between a puzzle and a novel with some real characters and a recognizable society for the readers at the time, a society where the War had left its impact.

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Chapter 3. Unnatural Death, Strong Poison and Miss Climpson

The status and role of women changed after the Great War. In theory most professions were open to women, the war had changed all that. The labour shortage had increased as the war went on, and women had partly filled the gap. They did office work, the female shorthand-typist took the place of the male clerk, women worked as conductors on buses, on the land and in munitions factories. Many of the returned men must have got a shock when they saw the “new” women, who smoked in public, had their hair cut and were wearing short dresses whose loose style was a complete change from the pre-war fashion which favoured the hour-glass figure. When the war was over, many of the women had no wish to return to the home to give room for the demobilized soldiers, they had got used to a different life. There was, however, an excess of women in

society. According to Taylor this excess was at its height in 1921, one and three quarter million (166). Although most demobilized young women “turned to the obvious

profession of marriage,” as Robert Graves puts it, there was the problem of “the surplus women” (45). Unemployment, which did not exist during the war, steadily increased in the years after the war. Taylor observes that it was over two million in June 1921, and although it fell again, it was never under one million between the wars (145). Among the many people who struggled with unemployment at the beginning of the twenties was also Dorothy Sayers.

Sayers was not a supporter of “aggressive feminism” as she calls it in a talk she gave in 1938, with the title “Are Women Human?”. She argues polemically against popular slogans like “a woman is as good as a man” and “woman’s place is the home,”

and speaks instead of the right of every human being to be looked upon as an individual: “what is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and

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preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs” (107). Women, as human beings, want an “interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their

pleasures and a sufficient emotional outlet,” she argues (114). She wants women to be accepted as human beings, belonging neither to an inferior nor a superior class.

In Whose Body? most of the supporting characters were men, this was according to the tradition of the genre. But as Sayers continued writing there is an increase in female characters in her novels. One of these is the colourful Miss Katherine Alexandra Climpson, who has a prominent position in Unnatural Death (1927) and even more so in Strong Poison (1930).

Miss Climpson is introduced in a rather unusual and entertaining way in

Unnatural Death. Wimsey and Parker are investigating a case of unexpected death in an elderly woman, and one day Wimsey asks Parker to come with him to visit a friend. He adds that Parker will be the first person he takes to see “her.” “She’s quite comfortably fixed in a little flat in Pimlico,” he says (25), and on their way there Wimsey continues talking about the “arrangement,” which apparently has lasted about six months, in a way which makes Parker (and the reader) certain about what type of set-up this is. Parker feels quite uncomfortable, as Wimsey and Parker do not usually talk about intimate personal things. However, the door is opened by

a thin middle-aged, woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward. (26)

Seeing Wimsey she exclaims, “Oh, Lord Peter! How very nice to see you. Rather an early visit, but I’m sure you will excuse the sitting-room being a trifle in disorder. Do come in. The lists are quite ready for you. I finished them last night” (26). As a matter

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of fact the room was very tidy except for a cup, an eggshell and a plate with some crumbs. The bewildered Parker is told after he and Wimsey have left that Miss Climpson is employed by Wimsey. The “lists” she is referring to have to do with the work she is generally doing for him, investigating newspaper advertisements, searching for attempted frauds and suspicious offers with the intention of taking advantage of women and the poor. Wimsey calls this his private pogrom and his

-Insurance against the Socialist Revolution – when it comes. ‘What did you do with your great wealth, comrade?’ ‘I bought First Editions.’ ‘Aristocrat! À la lanterne!’ ‘Stay, spare me! I took proceedings against 500 moneylenders who oppressed the workers.’ ‘Citizen, you have done well. We will spare your life.

You shall be promoted to clean out the sewers.’ (30)

In addition to the advertisement work Miss Climpson assists him in his other

investigations. As he observes, she can make inquiries where a man would be out of place asking questions, “I send a lady with a long woolly jumper on knitting needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions – everyone expects it.

Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed. And so-called superfluity is agreeable and usefully disposed of” (30). The “superfluity” that Wimsey is referring to, are the “old maids” who have no other choice than being companions, while their “magnificent gossip-powers” and inquisitiveness could instead be used in investigations where questions have to be asked. As he observes about Miss Climpson, “she asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush” (30).

Miss Climpson’s letters are similar to her oral style, full of underlinings, exclamation marks, and in an epistolary style. According to biographer Barbara Reynolds, this is an imitation of the letters of Sayers’ own Aunt Gertrude. Reynolds also observes that although Miss Climpson is “drawn with humour and affection,”

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Sayers did not really like Aunt Gertrude (200). On the other hand she had compassion for her father’s unmarried sisters, and in a letter she refers to Aunt Gertrude, who “lived peripatetically as a ‘companion’ to various old cats, saving halfpence and cadging trifles, aimlessly doing what when done was of little value to God or man. From all such frustrate unhappiness, God keep us!” (201).

Katherine Climpson is an intelligent and resourceful woman. She tells Parker and Wimsey that she would have liked to have a good education, “but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women” (Death 28). As Kuhn McGregor observes, “Miss Climpson is a definite victim of the prevalent Victorian attitudes toward women […]

condemned to a pointless existence as chaperone, travelling companion and common boarder” (68). In fact, if her father had not had that “attitude,” Miss Climpson could have had a university education. The first women’s colleges, Newnham College in Cambridge and Sayers’ own Somerville in Oxford, were founded in the 1870’s. Again it seems likely that Sayers, when creating the Climpson character, had her own unmarried aunts in mind.

However, as an employee of Lord Peter Wimsey’s, Miss Climpson’s experience from boarding houses comes in handy. In Unnatural Death he wants her to go to a small town in Hampshire to make discreet enquiries about the dead woman, posing as a

”retired lady in easy circumstances looking for a nice little place to settle down in” (29).

Her letters to Wimsey, reporting her findings, give an impression of how the case is progressing as well as a characterization of Miss Climpson:

On the day after my arrival, I informed Mrs. Budge that I was a great sufferer from rheumatism (which is quite true, as I have a sad legacy of that kind left me by, alas! my port-drinking ancestors!) – and I inquired what doctors there were in the neighbourhood […] I said I should prefer an elderly doctor, as the young men, in my opinion, were not to be depended on. Mrs. Budge heartily agreed with me, and a little discreet questioning brought out the whole story of Mrs.

From Mystery to Manners : A Study of Five Detective Novels by Dorothy L. Sayers